Destynee Speaks expects to major in psychology someday and help treat children with mental disorders. Tyler Whisinnand sees law school in his future. Virnesha Brown hopes to be a pediatrician.

Few of the Susquehanna Township High School students who exhibited at the NexGen Youth Arts Festival expect to be professional artists. But all were excited to show their work to a broader audience at the Oct. 20-21 event at Harrisburg Area Community College, and all expect to weave art into their professional lives.

Youth organizers with BARAK Inc. created and staged NexGen, which convened students from diverse schools and backgrounds to exhibit their art, read their poetry and display their dance moves.

Students in Susquehanna Township High School’s new School of the Arts learned to properly measure dimensions of their pieces and write artists’ statements to help them respond to questions and “be prepared to speak intelligently, using art vocabulary terms,” art teacher Charlene Swoboda said.

“If you’re studying to be an artist, it’s important that you exhibit your work somewhere and get used to how to represent yourself,” she said. “It’s different in the classroom. When you venture out, it takes a little confidence-building, and this gives us the opportunity.”

Swoboda said her students also now have a first exhibit to list on their artists’ resumes.

“It looks good on college applications,” art teacher Greg Smith said.

Senior Nick Edwards, who entered a pencil drawing in NexGen, is more interested in a science career, but art has been a big help.

“It’s definitely made me more attentive to details,” he said. Smith’s students exhibiting at NexGen included seniors Eli Weinberg, Faith Dippery and Brown. Dippery expects to attend art college, but all three agreed when Brown — maybe a future pediatrician — said, “I think we’ll all minor in art.”

They were excited about showing at an exhibit outside the school. Dippery liked “the fact that we don’t really know” exhibitgoers.

“They’re less biased,” she said. “Your family’s like, ‘Oh, they’re so good.’ Well, you have to say that.”

Amelia Allen, one of Swoboda’s students, said that 10 of her family members, including a visiting aunt, attended the show because it was her first.

“This one’s more real,” she said.

Whisinnand thinks he can be a lawyer and artist at the same time.

“I can be an artist on days when I’m not working a case,” he said. “The experience will help.”

Speaks covered the exhibit for And magazine, the local student-produced journal.

“You can go and see how different artists work, so you’re not standing around your own idea of art and what’s beautiful to you. You can learn new stuff and see new things.”

Before the show, she admitted to being nervous. “It’s a lot of people at one time, seeing it for the first time,” she said, but she has definite ideas for using art in her future as a child psychologist.

“I was going to incorporate art into it, like pictures they can interpret and see if maybe whichever way they take it could diagnose certain things, and they could draw pictures to show how they’re feeling inside,” she said. 